Recent reviews by John Helldiver

Do NOT play if you value your time and money!

Ubisoft will temp ban you from playing for 15 minutes if you crash, or quit a bad match and that's on unranked/casual mode. It's not worth it to play a bad and buggy mess full of cheaters, inconsistent gameplay, FOMO sales tactics, and Flavor of the Month balancing + power creep.

Mordhau is not too different from Chivalry or For Honor. It is a game of highs and lows, with an emphasis on lows. Triternion is well known for its development cycle being slower than chilled molasses, and its tendencies to implement overtuned weaponry while ignoring them for weeks on end.

A match is known to be over well before it's even started, with the new "auto-balancing" achieving anything but. Games are stacked almost worse than they have ever been. Players who are known to cheat or be uber-sweats desperately in need of a shower and the touch of grass are what you'll find in most lobbies.

This game will be most frustrating of course for people of middling skill. Good enough to best most honest players, but never quite good enough to best people who cheese the game with broken weapons or breaking the mechanics in the most absurd character-model and animation breaking ways with excessive drags and accels.

I don't recommend this game because the aggravation isn't really worth the dollar price, and despite sinking many hours into this game myself, I still find myself dissatisfied. Between the buggy and broken weapons roster, mechanics, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ community, and slow development cycle, I find it is only compounded by Triternion and its moderation staff committing to modern political woke games and enforcing censorship campaigns, silencing people who say anything displeasing.

If this game catches your eye, it will be for its lavish textures, brutal combat, and meme-able moments, but based on this player's experience, those moments are fleeting, and unless you're a cheater or know how to break the game in the most absurd ways, you likely will never find yourself at a level of mastery that you'll be satisfied with, assuming you're anything like me and you strive not just for victory, but victory with panache, some flair and glory.

Save yourself the aggravation, pass on this one.

Between the incompetence of the Star Vault development staff, whether it be their inability to prioritize development needs in a remotely logical way; and the corruption that is their GM and Forum Moderation staff who have been known to take sides with in game conflicts, harassing guilds and individuals alike, this game has proven to be a long running letdown.

Don't let recent strides in development fool you. Of a planned dozen or more landscapes and continents, only two have been developed and released. PvP combat competitiveness and "balance" is dictated by the whims of the ever fickle "PvP/random player killer" crowd, who often just ceaselessly complain on the forums until they get their way, usually resulting in the over nerfing of whatever it was that challenged or beat them.


If you find yourself having a beef with moderators or GM's, they will censor you, they will ban you, they will do everything they can to make your game time miserable.

Their corruption was immortalized when the Lead GM "Discord" under orders of Star Vault CEO Henrik Nystrom, aided the notorious (in game) hacker by the name of "RUSSIAN", due to the latter's friendship with Mr. Nystrom. Said aid was in the form of valuable materials in large numbers, gold coin in large numbers, and skill books of all kinds and rarities.


While it is true that there are very few, if any, games similar to this, and that the experience is unique, you will find yourself feeling a lot of emotions, mostly anger, contempt, and toxicity that you have likely never known before.


I strongly recommend avoiding this game. Because even after an 8-year run since it launched in 2010, they still have a corrupt GM team led by "Discord", and the company is still headed by Henrik Nystrom.

This game is hilarious, with simple and intuitive controls. Brings you back to the old N-64 days and your childhood when "ARMY MEN" was a bigger label than it is now.

This is not the kind of game to take seriously, ever. It's fast paced, cartoony, glossy, and filled with fun. The only downside is lack of players and lack of dedicated servers, so peer to peer and individual server hosting is necessary.

SOE was always an incompetent development team. Playing fast and loose with their staffing standards and the rules which their GM's pick and choose to enforce depending on their personal feelings. Rulesets are vague and disciplinary actions are often grossly overdone depending on the offending action.


When SOE was bought out by some Russian company the quality of the game dropped severely as it became overrun with hackers and cheaters of varying kinds. The server quality has dropped significantly. Balance between the three assymetric factions is extremely difficult to come by and more often than not sits in favor of the Vanu Sovereignty faction.

Fourth Factioning is a common problem as there are few loyalists to faction and no temporary or permanent faction lock system to discourage Fourth Faction players from their habit, further swinging the balance of power into odd rises and falls rather than predictable results.




If you want a game filled to the brim with micro-payments on overpriced cosmetic virtual items and "memberships" only to feel like your money was stolen when their company refuses a refund or bans you for "language" when you get into arguments with other players and someone gets their feelings hurt, you've found the right game. But if you'd rather spare your wallet and yourself the frustration, I'd highly recommend AVOIDING this title.

I can only say one thing about my experience with this game so far, You WILL die.

There is no alternate reality or timeline where you will go through this game unscathed and without feeling the icey embrace of death, but you will learn, you will grow stronger, smarter, faster. You will adapt and overcome, and you will feel so much more accomplished for it.

This is the kind of game that will break you down and rebuild you as a gamer, when.. if you beat this masterfully crafted quest and storyline, you will come to realize that you all of a sudden have a much higher standard for games.